Correct Answer: C) “The most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had”

Explanation: This question is about John Dryden, not Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen did not write major critiques of Ben Jonson. This seems to be a crossover question.

Correct Answer: D) Lisideius

Explanation: This question is about John Dryden’s essay, not a work by Ibsen. Lisideius champions French playwrights for their adherence to classical unities.

Correct Answer: A) Metaphrase, Paraphrase, and Imitation

Explanation: This is famously John Dryden’s theory of translation. Ibsen was a playwright and poet, not a translation theorist in this manner.

Correct Answer: B) A move away from building churches, signifying his turn from God to a humanistic focus

Explanation: Solness’s career path from building churches to building homes is a key symbol of his artistic and spiritual journey, a shift from serving God to building for human happiness, though he feels he failed at both.

Correct Answer: C) The emotional deadness caused by sacrificing love for ambition

Explanation: Borkman speaks of a “cold hand of metal” gripping his heart on the day he gave up the woman he loved for his career. His death from the cold on the mountain is the physical manifestation of this inner spiritual death.

Correct Answer: B) His and Irene’s spiritual death and the potential for an awakening

Explanation: The sculpture, which depicted a pure woman (Irene) awakening on resurrection day, was Rubek’s greatest work. He now feels it represents their “dead” life, and their journey up the mountain is an attempt to “awaken.”

Correct Answer: B) The demand that life be lived in absolute, uncompromising truth

Explanation: Gregers believes the Ekdal family can only achieve a “true marriage” if the “life-lie” it is built upon is exposed. He fails to see that this “ideal” will shatter their fragile happiness.

Correct Answer: D) The healthy, spontaneous, and guilt-free expression of one’s natural instincts

Explanation: Mrs. Alving recognizes that the life-denying conventions represented by Pastor Manders crushed her husband’s natural “joy of life,” leading to his secret debauchery and their shared tragedy.

Correct Answer: A) The parents’ reliance on their son to give their lives meaning

Explanation: The child Eyolf is lame and uses a crutch. After he drowns, his parents realize they used him as a metaphorical “crutch” to support their empty marriage, never loving him for his own sake.

Correct Answer: A) A black-clad deaconess (a nun)

Explanation: The silent deaconess follows Irene everywhere, symbolizing the constant, repressive watchfulness of conventional religion and society over the free spirit.

Correct Answer: C) Catalyst or troll-like embodiment of ruthless youth

Explanation: Hilde is not a conventional heroine. She is an ambiguous force who goads Solness to confront his fears and live up to his past promises, with both inspiring and destructive results.

Correct Answer: B) Because she begins as a cold manipulator but develops a conscience and is “ennobled” by the Rosmer view of life

Explanation: Her psychological journey is the play’s focus. The amoral “New Woman” is ultimately conquered and transformed by the traditional, guilt-ridden idealism of the man she came to destroy, leading to their shared fate.

Correct Answer: C) Their idealism paralyzes their will and prevents them from living fully.

Explanation: The “Rosmer view of life” is one of extreme moral scrupulousness and idealism, which ultimately makes it impossible for Johannes Rosmer to act decisively or embrace life, a legacy of “ennobling suffering.”

Correct Answer: C) His manuscript about the future of civilization

Explanation: The manuscript represents their spiritual and intellectual union. When Hedda burns it, she is committing a symbolic form of infanticide out of jealousy.

Correct Answer: A) Thomas Stockmann in *An Enemy of the People*

Explanation: This is part of Stockmann’s aggressive, combative rhetorical style. However, the irony is that he, too, is ultimately a man of words, fighting against the pragmatic actions of the town.

Correct Answer: B) A selfish academic ambition to escape his wife and son

Explanation: The play reveals that his great intellectual project was actually an excuse to avoid his emotional duties as a husband and father. He must abandon the book to truly embrace human responsibility.

Correct Answer: C) Gunhild and Ella Rentheim

Explanation: Gunhild is his stern wife, waiting for his name to be cleared. Ella is the woman he truly loved but sacrificed. They both pin their hopes on Borkman’s son, Erhart, leading to the play’s central conflict.

Correct Answer: B) A satirical term for an obsessive focus on social problems in drama

Explanation: Anti-Ibsenite critics in the late 19th century used “Ibsenitis” to mock what they saw as the morbid, unhealthy, and didactic obsession with social ills found in his plays and those of his followers.

Correct Answer: C) Scène à faire

Explanation: Ibsen was a master of the *scène à faire* (the scene that “must be done”). The final confrontation between Nora and Torvald is a perfect example, where all secrets are revealed and the central conflict is resolved.

Correct Answer: B) Its intricate plotting and suspense built around a secret

Explanation: Ibsen took the clever, mechanical plotting of the “well-made play” (perfected by French writers like Scribe) and fused it with deep psychological realism and social commentary, giving the old form a new and powerful purpose.

Correct Answer: B) The shift from hope and illusion to a tragic or uncertain reality

Explanation: This is a common symbolic pattern. The plays begin in the light of day, representing societal norms and illusions, and end in lamplight or darkness as difficult truths are revealed, as seen in *Ghosts* and *Rosmersholm*.

Correct Answer: D) Both B and C

Explanation: Both Arthur Miller (with his social problem plays like *All My Sons*) and Tennessee Williams (with his psychological realism and symbolism) were profoundly influenced by Ibsen’s dramatic model.

Correct Answer: B) A claustrophobic and inescapable trap

Explanation: The single-room setting of most of the realistic plays reinforces the sense that the characters are trapped by their environment, their past, and social conventions, with no easy way out.

Correct Answer: C) Symbolism

Explanation: *The Wild Duck* is often seen as a turning point where Ibsen began moving away from pure social realism, using the attic and the duck itself as rich, multi-layered symbols that represent the characters’ inner lives.

Correct Answer: B) *Oedipus Rex*

Explanation: Like Sophocles’ *Oedipus Rex*, Ibsen’s realistic plays are structured as an investigation. The action is not about what will happen, but about discovering what has *already* happened, with each revelation leading to the final catastrophe.

Correct Answer: D) James Joyce

Explanation: A teenage James Joyce was a huge admirer of Ibsen. He learned Norwegian to write to his idol and published an extensive and highly laudatory review of Ibsen’s final play in the *Fortnightly Review* in 1900.

Correct Answer: D) *Ghosts*

Explanation: The initial reviews for the London premiere of *Ghosts* were spectacularly hostile. It was described as “an open drain,” “a loathsome sore unbandaged,” and “gross, almost putrid indecorum.”

Correct Answer: C) 16th-century Norway during the Reformation

Explanation: This early work is a national-historical tragedy, revolving around the powerful Lady Inger and the complex political intrigues surrounding Norwegian independence from Denmark and Sweden.

Correct Answer: B) The conflict between poetic idealism and the mundane compromises of bourgeois marriage

Explanation: The play argues that true, passionate, ideal love cannot survive the conventions of marriage. The poet lovers Falk and Svanhild renounce their love and part at the end to preserve its perfection.

Correct Answer: C) He dies in an avalanche and a voice declares that God is a “God of Love.”

Explanation: Having sacrificed everything for his ideal, Brand is destroyed by the very forces of nature he tried to command. The final words, “He is deus caritatis” (a God of Love), suggest his “All or Nothing” creed was a terrible misinterpretation of divinity.

Correct Answer: D) *The Pretenders*

Explanation: King Haakon possesses the innate “kingly thought,” the certainty of his destiny, while his rival, the more poetically-minded Earl Skule, is tortured by doubt about his own calling, a theme that haunted Ibsen himself.

Correct Answer: B) “On the contrary!” (*Tvertimod!*)

Explanation: A testament to his lifelong contrarian and fiercely realistic spirit, his final articulate word was one of negation.

Correct Answer: C) Nora Helmer

Explanation: While she considers suicide to erase her debt and shame, Nora’s revolutionary act is to choose life and self-discovery by leaving. Hedda, Rosmer (with Rebecca), and Hedvig all die by suicide.

Correct Answer: D) The Judge (e.g., Judge Brack)

Explanation: Judge Brack in *Hedda Gabler* is the archetype of this figure—an apparently respectable man who understands and manipulates the sordid secrets of society for his own advantage.

Correct Answer: C) A red scarf

Explanation: The wild duck (*The Wild Duck*), General Gabler’s pistols (*Hedda Gabler*), and the white horses (*Rosmersholm*) are all powerful Ibsenite symbols. A red scarf is not a significant symbol in his major works.

Correct Answer: C) *Hedda Gabler*

Explanation: It is Judge Brack’s final, shocked utterance after Hedda shoots herself, an ironic comment from a man who prides himself on understanding all worldly corruptions but cannot grasp an act of absolute, individual will.

Correct Answer: B) A series of towers and steeples

Explanation: The act of climbing—both literally and metaphorically—is central. Solness’s journey from building church steeples to the tower on his own house symbolizes his changing ambitions and his ultimate tragic fall.

Correct Answer: A) “Oak valley,” suggesting a connection to nature

Explanation: The name implies a rustic, natural origin, which is ironic given that the family lives in a city apartment and can only experience “nature” in their artificial attic forest.

Correct Answer: D) Public opinion and good order

Explanation: While a man of the church, Manders’s primary motivation is not spiritual guidance but the upholding of social appearances and conventions. He fears scandal more than he fears sin.

Correct Answer: D) *When We Dead Awaken*

Explanation: Subtitled “A Dramatic Epilogue,” *When We Dead Awaken* (1899) was the last play Henrik Ibsen completed.

Correct Answer: C) *Analytische Technik*

Explanation: German criticism was vital to Ibsen’s European reputation, and this term (“analytic technique”) was coined to describe his method of retrospective exposition where the plot is a slow analysis of past events.

Correct Answer: C) Eilert Løvborg

Explanation: This is Hedda Gabler’s romanticized vision of Løvborg as a figure of ecstatic, brilliant self-destruction, an image brutally undercut by the sordid reality of his death.

Correct Answer: C) *An Enemy of the People*

Explanation: When the liberal-minded townspeople and press turn on him for economic reasons, Dr. Stockmann becomes disillusioned with democracy itself, declaring the majority is always wrong and minorities are right.

Correct Answer: D) Both A and B

Explanation: Both Torvald’s past illness (which was likely a result of overwork within a corrupt system) and Dr. Rank’s inherited disease symbolize the sickness and moral decay hidden beneath the surface of their respectable bourgeois world.

Correct Answer: C) Solveig

Explanation: Solveig is the constant force of love and faith in Peer’s life. She waits for him in a cabin for decades, and it is in her that he finds his final hope for redemption.

Correct Answer: A) Rome

Explanation: Ibsen’s initial period of exile was spent largely in Italy, especially Rome. The warmth and southern light contrasted sharply with the gloomy Norwegian society he depicted in his plays.

Correct Answer: C) The failed, alcoholic idealist and intellectual

Explanation: Brendel was Rosmer’s former tutor and a brilliant intellectual who never managed to write his great works. He is a ghost from the past, showing the futility and decay of pure idealism without action.

Correct Answer: C) She speaks in a monotone, lifeless voice.

Explanation: Irene explains that she died the day Rubek left her. Her voice is described as cold and toneless, as if coming from a tomb, reflecting her spiritual death after he took her soul for his art.

Correct Answer: D) *An Enemy of the People*

Explanation: Ibsen was furious at the public reception of *Ghosts*. He wrote *An Enemy of the People* as a defiant counter-attack, dramatizing the story of an honest man who speaks the truth and is vilified for it by the corrupt “majority.”

Correct Answer: C) Her nine beautiful dolls

Explanation: She mourns the dolls, which she carried with her from her childhood home, as much or more than her babies. This symbolizes the loss of her past, her joy, and her own “calling” in life, which she feels was destroyed by Solness’s ambition.

Correct Answer: C) The idealist struggling with a legacy of guilt (e.g., Johannes Rosmer)

Explanation: Characters like Rosmer and Alfred Allmers are plagued by an inherited moral scrupulousness that prevents them from acting decisively and embracing life, a theme Ibsen explored in his transition to more symbolic drama.

Correct Answer: C) A “helper and a server”

Explanation: Solness has a mystical, troll-like belief that if he desires something strongly enough, these demonic “helpers and servers” will make it happen, but always at a terrible price, such as the burning of his wife’s home.

Correct Answer: D) She was brave to do what she did

Explanation: His reaction is one of pure selfish terror. He accuses her of being all the other things but shows no appreciation for her motive or courage until his own reputation is safe, by which point it is too late.

Correct Answer: D) Edvard Munch

Explanation: Munch felt a deep kinship with Ibsen’s work. He designed programs and sets for several productions and created his famous “Ibsen Frieze” for the Kammerspiele theatre in Berlin.

Correct Answer: C) Hate (a “cold” heart) and Love (a “warm” heart)

Explanation: Gunhild’s love has turned to bitter hatred and a desire for social redemption. Ella Rentheim has kept her pure love for Borkman alive, despite his betrayal. Their fight over Erhart is a fight between these two life principles.

Correct Answer: C) They begin to piece together Løvborg’s manuscript from Thea’s notes.

Explanation: This final image is Hedda’s ultimate defeat. Even though she destroyed the “child,” she is replaced by a new “child”—a collaboration between her husband and her rival. It symbolizes the victory of cooperative, creative work over individualistic, destructive ego.

Correct Answer: B) Nils Krogstad

Explanation: After his reunion with Christine Linde, Krogstad has a change of heart and says this when he agrees to ask for his threatening letter back from Torvald, though Christine persuades him to leave it so the truth can come out.

Correct Answer: A) The unhealthy state of modern society

Explanation: From Dr. Stockmann seeing his town as a moral “sick-room” to the literal and figurative diseases in *Ghosts* and *A Doll’s House*, Ibsen frequently uses medical metaphors to diagnose the ills of bourgeois life.

Correct Answer: D) *Brand*

Explanation: As part of his “All or Nothing” creed, Brand refuses to visit his dying mother to give her the last rites because she will not give up all her worldly possessions. It is one of the most extreme and tragic choices in the play.

Correct Answer: C) *Either/Or*

Explanation: Kierkegaard’s exploration of the “aesthetic” stage (lived for pleasure and possibility, like Peer Gynt) versus the “ethical” stage (lived through commitment and absolute choice, like Brand) is a clear philosophical backdrop for Ibsen’s two great verse dramas.

Correct Answer: B) “The Sphinx of Christiania”

Explanation: After his return from exile, Ibsen became a famous local figure known for his rigid daily routines, formal dress, and unapproachable, enigmatic demeanor, earning him this nickname.

Correct Answer: B) *Emperor and Galilean*

Explanation: The play charts the attempt by the Emperor Julian to fuse these two opposing world-views into a “Third Empire.”

Correct Answer: C) Dr. Relling

Explanation: Dr. Relling is the cynical but pragmatic voice in *The Wild Duck* who directly opposes Gregers’s idealism, arguing that illusions are necessary for survival.

Correct Answer: B) *The Lady from the Sea*

Explanation: The Stranger who comes to claim Ellida is presented as a mythic figure from the sea, representing her longing for a life of freedom and wildness that her domestic marriage cannot offer.

Correct Answer: D) A farmer

Explanation: Peer becomes fabulously wealthy through unethical means like slave-trading, reinvents himself as a desert prophet, and is an amateur historian in a madhouse. However, he never engages in the steady, honest work of farming.

Correct Answer: B) The Nietzschean “Will to Power”

Explanation: Hilda is an amoral force of nature. Her desire for “castles in the air,” her demand that Solness be a “master builder,” and her “robust conscience” align perfectly with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who also admired self-overcoming individuals.

Correct Answer: C) Pass judgment on oneself

Explanation: The full quote, “To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself,” reveals Ibsen’s view of art as a form of profound and difficult self-examination.

Correct Answer: B) “The minority may be right — the majority is always wrong.”

Explanation: This is part of Dr. Stockmann’s final, defiant speech to the town, where his battle over science turns into an elitist, quasi-Nietzschean attack on democracy itself.

Correct Answer: C) It was an economic and social arrangement that stifled individual growth, especially for women.

Explanation: From *A Doll’s House* to *Hedda Gabler*, Ibsen repeatedly portrayed marriage not as a union of equals, but as a constricting institution where economic dependency and social pressure trapped individuals in false roles.

Correct Answer: B) London

Explanation: This group, which included George Bernard Shaw, Eleanor Marx (Karl Marx’s daughter), and the critic William Archer (Ibsen’s translator), fought to have his plays staged in London against fierce opposition from the conservative establishment.

Correct Answer: B) By dedicating her life to helping the poor children of the village

Explanation: After facing the truth about their failed marriage and parenthood, she and Alfred decide to stay together and find a new purpose in altruistic work, a tentative and uncertain form of redemption.

Correct Answer: B) An ascent up a high mountain into a storm

Explanation: They attempt to achieve a final spiritual “wedding” by climbing into the mountains to greet the “sun of life,” only to be consumed by an avalanche—a final, ambiguous image of destructive transfiguration.

Correct Answer: B) His primary English translator and champion

Explanation: William Archer was a Scottish critic and translator whose work was crucial for introducing and popularizing Henrik Ibsen’s plays to the English-speaking world.

Correct Answer: B) He seizes her and tries to stop her from leaving by force.

Explanation: As she tries to leave, Torvald tells her she cannot, stating he has the right. Her reply, “Have I not the same right?” marks a crucial moment in her rebellion against his ownership.

Correct Answer: C) *Love’s Comedy*, said about the poet Falk

Explanation: This line encapsulates the central theme of the play: the conflict between the poetic, idealized world of love and the prosaic, compromising world of reality.

Correct Answer: C) The Independent Theatre Movement

Explanation: Because Ibsen’s controversial plays were censored from the mainstream commercial stage, small, private “independent” theatres (like the Théâtre Libre in Paris and the Independent Theatre Society in London) were founded specifically to produce his non-commercial, artistically serious work.

Correct Answer: D) Russia, as a government official

Explanation: Peer’s extensive journeys take him through North Africa and America, but he does not travel to Russia.

Correct Answer: C) A Norwegian novelist whose wife burned his manuscript

Explanation: Ibsen was fascinated by a story of the writer J. S. Welhaven, whose wife, in a fit of jealousy over his supposed affair with an emancipated woman, burned the manuscript of his life’s work. This event was a direct inspiration for Hedda’s action.

Correct Answer: D) *Rosmersholm*

Explanation: Believing they can only be truly united in guilt and death, Johannes Rosmer and Rebecca West commit a double suicide by jumping into the same mill-race where Rosmer’s first wife died.

Correct Answer: A) A pig

Explanation: The pig, which will soon be slaughtered, sings of its blissful ignorance and self-satisfaction. It’s another representation of the empty “Gyntian self.”

Correct Answer: B) *The Pillars of Society*

Explanation: While *A Doll’s House* was more explosive, *The Pillars of Society* (1877) was the first play in the cycle of twelve contemporary realistic plays that defined his mature career.

Correct Answer: D) A play featuring a tightly constructed plot that methodically reveals a past secret

Explanation: The term “Ibsenite” is now critical shorthand for this retrospective dramatic structure that became so influential in the works of playwrights like Arthur Miller.

Correct Answer: C) Irene in *When We Dead Awaken*

Explanation: After Irene left, Rubek altered their “child,” his sculpture “The Resurrection Day,” by adding his own guilt-ridden face and animalistic figures, which Irene sees as a profound betrayal of their shared ideal.

Correct Answer: B) *”In the Hall of the Mountain King”*

Explanation: The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg wrote the incidental music for the first performance of *Peer Gynt*. The piece “In the Hall of the Mountain King” has become world-famous and is instantly associated with the play’s troll scene.

Correct Answer: B) A connection to a military, aristocratic, and masculine world

Explanation: “Gabler” is her father’s name—*General* Gabler. She identifies with his world of horses, pistols, and authority, not the bourgeois, domestic world of her husband, Tesman.

Correct Answer: C) Less than 24 hours

Explanation: The play is a perfect example of Ibsen’s use of compressed time to increase dramatic tension, adhering to the classical Unity of Time. It begins in the afternoon and ends at sunrise the next day.

Correct Answer: B) An amoral, destructive, or possessive force within the human psyche

Explanation: Ibsen internalized the trolls from *Peer Gynt*. Characters like Hedda Gabler and Hilde Wangel are often described as “troll-like,” meaning they are driven by ruthless, amoral impulses that exist outside conventional human feeling.

Correct Answer: D) The brightly lit drawing room and the dark mill-race

Explanation: This is a key symbolic contrast. The respectable, “enlightened” drawing-room is juxtaposed with the dark, mysterious mill-race where the secrets of the past and the tragic conclusion reside. Light and darkness are central motifs.

Correct Answer: B) Because it was a messy, accidental shooting in a brothel, not a beautiful suicide

Explanation: He cruelly dispels Hedda’s romantic fantasy of “vine leaves in his hair.” The sordid reality—a shot in the gut, likely accidental, in Mademoiselle Diana’s boudoir—shatters her aesthetic ideal completely.

Correct Answer: C) The debt that a man of business owes to the truth

Explanation: Consul Bernick has built his reputation on lies. The play’s crisis forces him to confront the idea that the “spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom” are the true pillars of society, not financial success based on deceit.

Correct Answer: B) An extended academic research trip for Jörgen, which served as their honeymoon

Explanation: This detail immediately establishes the boredom and frustration at the heart of their marriage. Hedda’s honeymoon was spent listening to her husband rummage through dusty archives, a perfect image of her unromantic entrapment.

Correct Answer: D) *Ghosts*

Explanation: *Ghosts* is the ultimate Ibsenite tragedy of heredity. Oswald inherits a literal, physical disease (syphilis) from his father, representing the inescapable consequences of past sins and moral corruption.

Correct Answer: B) Ibsen’s technique of having the climax of the play be a conversation that dissects a social issue

Explanation: The final act of plays like *A Doll’s House* replaced the conventional climax of action (a duel, a death) with a devastatingly powerful conversation that laid bare the entire social and psychological conflict. George Bernard Shaw later adopted and perfected this technique.

Correct Answer: A) Nora Helmer

Explanation: “The Angel in the House” was a Victorian ideal of the selfless, pure, domestic woman. Ibsen’s play is a systematic dismantling of this ideal, showing the psychological damage it inflicts.

Correct Answer: C) *Brand*

Explanation: Both plays end with their protagonists high on a mountain, being consumed by an avalanche. Brand is destroyed by his uncompromising idealism, while Rubek is destroyed in a final attempt to reclaim the life he sacrificed for his art.

Correct Answer: C) There is no emotional release or purification for the audience; they are left with a raw, unresolved problem.

Explanation: Unlike classical tragedy which offers catharsis (a purging of pity and fear), a play like *Ghosts* ends on a note of stark, unresolved horror. Ibsen leaves the audience to grapple with the social and moral questions themselves, which was his revolutionary aim.

Correct Answer: D) Nora Helmer

Explanation: This is a key line from Nora’s final speech to Torvald, signifying her complete awakening. She realizes that their entire marriage has been based on illusions and that they have never had a true conversation or partnership.

Correct Answer: C) *Rosmersholm*

Explanation: Rebecca West, with her “pagan” and amoral willpower, comes into conflict with the cripplingly moral, guilt-ridden “Rosmer view of life,” represented by Johannes Rosmer. The tragedy unfolds as his conscience “infects” and paralyzes hers.

Correct Answer: C) Contemporary, middle-class Norwegian homes

Explanation: The revolutionary power of his realism came from staging profound tragedies and moral dilemmas not among kings or mythological figures, but in the familiar, respectable drawing-rooms of his own time.

Correct Answer: D) A small, tame bird of prey

Explanation: He sees Maja as a creature of the earth, not of the heights where his art resides. He captured her, but she was never meant for a cage. Her final pairing with the “bear-hunter” Ulfhejm completes this metaphor.